Technology Close-Up: Optical Fiber Soliton Communication

Under certain circumstances, a single pulse of self-maintaining shape, called a solitary wave, can exist in a dispersive, nonlinear medium.

This well-established fact is mostly remarkable for the historical curiosity that 140 years elapsed between John Scott Russell's first reported observation of such a solitary wave in 1834 and the realization that this generic property of nonlinear waves had important applications...